Coming Down with Contactitis

It’s a drag, but can be cured

Every website needs a way for visitors to send a message to its proprietors. Some sites provide an email address, but typically they have a form on a page that tends to be called Contact. That’s what I did when I set up a website for my publishing imprint, Perfidy Press. Having put together several sites already, I should have known better than to set up a contact page that wasn’t protected against robots, but gave it no thought. Naively, I presumed that only people who cared about my content would bother to contact me. That seems to have been the case for the first six months it was online, when one or two responses a week got dumped into my inbox, but in the last two months it’s been more like one or two a day, and they keep getting more bizarre.

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Presidents’ Day Gets a Makeover

President Trump has signed an executive order changing the date of President’s day, a national holiday established to celebrate President Washington’s birthday (February 22, 1732) and observed the third Monday in February. Most states have declared the day a holiday, often including Abraham Lincoln (b. February 12, 1809) and our third president, Thomas Jefferson (b. April 13, 1743).

His unexpected decree moves the holiday to the second Monday of June, a date he said is more favorable for shopping and parades. “No more schlepping to dealerships in a blizzard to get those great Presidents’ Day car deals,” he said, noting the change is effective immediately. “So this year, we’ll celebrate twice, and we’ll have the biggest military parade the world has ever seen, all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue. And I’m hoping the Marine Band will play ‘Happy Birthday.’ Nice if Xi could show up.”

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Helpful Hashtags 4 Men

Hey guys, it’s getting dangerous to be a man especially if your name is in wide circulation. Look at all those media makhers going down. So what about the rest of us blokes who don’t figure in People Magazine or have six-figure incomes? We might not get national attention for alleged conquests but our reputations could easily be besmirched too. And it’s most likely to happen on that most public of social media, Twitter. It’s time to get proactive, @VulnerableDudes.

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